HASTA LA VISTA, CA /DenounceNewswire/ -- November 18, 1998 -- Netscape Communications Corporation (Nasdaq: NSCP - news) today announced it acquired the NewHoo! Community Directory Project as a part of its continued, desperate effort to catch up to Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, AOL, and other Internet port-holes. Netscape will immediately mess up the NewHoo! service with crass commercialism in an attempt to mimic the look and feel of other Internet port-holes. The new commercial service, called ``Netscape Open Directory,'' will be the first Internet port-hole to harness the knowledge and creativity of over 4,500 Internet ``volunteer editors'' to empower consumers to find the information they want quickly and easily.

Netscape announced that the purchase, valued at $40.05 billion, will be accounted for as a one-time charge on its fiscal fourth-quarter 1998 books. This valuation represents the highest price ever paid in the history of the world for a company founded less than one year ago.

The founders of NewHoo, which includes Rich Skrenta, Bob Truel, Chris Tolles, Jeremy Wenokur and Bryn Dole, each stand to gain approximately $8 billion from the transaction. Mr. Skrenta, also known as the co-author of the widely-used "tin" newsreader program, was unavailable for comment, as he had fainted. Messrs. Truel, Tolles, Wenokur, and Dole were also unavailable for comment, as they too had fainted or were in the process of fainting.

Each of the 4500 "volunteer editors" will be paid a $50 honorarium as part of the transaction. Asked if that was a little on the cheap side, a NewHoo representative replied, "well, they're only volunteers, I mean, after all."

Netscape, which according to nationally-recognized legal experts is currently kicking major butt in the federal litigation against Microsoft Corporation, is seeking to expand its grasp of Internet mindshare with the acquisition of the NewHoo directory. Oddly, in an exhaustive, frantic 36-hour survey of 1.8 million randomly-selected individuals in cities across the world, only 0.1 of the people questioned had ever even heard of NewHoo, and only 0.000178 percent of those polled indicated they had ever used NewHoo. Asked why Netscape placed so much value on the company, Jim Barksdale, official executive chief of the company, replied that the survey also revealed that 88.2% of those polled replied with "NewHoo? You mean, Yahoo?" when originally asked about NewHoo. "88.2 percent of anything is a good number, and that impressed us a great deal," he said.

Posted by denounce on November 18, 1998 06:11 PM